Monday, September 30, 2013

How to get rid of cockroaches.

How do you do it in your home?

In my home, if a roach appears, the kids will stand around and scream: There's a roach!!There's a roach!!

And they will stand on the sofa and watch it. If it stops moving, they will still stand around and scream some more. As if the screaming will kill the roach. No active action to kill it. Not even with bug spray!!

I have observed others spray a whole canister of pesticide at the insect.

From what I know, 2 squirts are actually sufficient to kill the roach.

In my home, how much roach spray I use will depend on how fast moving the roach is and the size of it. The faster and larger it is, the more I will spray.

Another method commonly used in my home, by yours truly most of the time, is to whack the roach with some old newspapers. That's bound to kill it. This method is used if the roach is fast moving and it will disappear into some corners by the time I get around to getting the bug spray.

But if your aim is not as good, or if you have poor hand-eye co-ordination, I would recommend dropping a pile of newspapers or magazines on the roach. This way, you have a bigger margin of error. But you will also end up with a bigger mass of mess that you have to clear coz by dropping those magazines on the roach, coz you will end up with a roach "penyet". (Penyet means flattened in Malay).

There are of course other ways to kill roaches, like buying commercial roach traps, which lure the roaches and then trap them with an adhesive. You just have to buy them and leave them in places where you normally find them.There are also numerous homemade roach baits which you can make using boric acid, flour and cocoa.But the best thing to do is to keep the home clean. Clean up spills and crumbs immediately, keep food away, empty trash frequently, fix leaky faucets (roaches are attracted to water) and leave some naphthalene balls around - roaches hate the smell!!How are roaches killed in your home?

2 comments:

They said put some pandan leaves in the drawer, it will keep them away. But it does not work. I do not have many roaches in my house in Kuching. But they seem to like the particular drawer where I keep all my baking utensils. I thought I could have put the utensils in without wiping them dry at times. Few weeks ago, I took out all the utensils, ran the drawer under tap and let it under the sun for few hours. Cleaned and dried the utensils before putting them back. The result is, all roaches are gone! Thanks for confirming that roaches like wet places. They do.

yes Yan, I have also found that pandan leaves dont work. Funny that my baking utensils drawer is a fav for the roaches too, no matter how many times we clear it out. Must be the lingering aroma of our baking on the utensils that draws them.